A wide variety of frozen novelty products are commercially available. As consumer tastes shift over time, it becomes important for commercial producers of such novelties to alter their products to anticipate or meet consumer demand. Frozen novelties over the years have included a number of different additions to the basic formulation. For instance, ice cream novelties have been made which include spiral stripes of fudge sauce or the like along their exterior surface, chocolate coatings, or nuts sprinkled on top.
In recent years, ice cream and frozen yogurt products including additions of uncooked doughs and the like have become quite popular. These doughs have, for example, included discrete, rounded chunks of uncooked cookie dough, particularly chocolate chip and peanut butter cookie doughs. Such ice cream or frozen yogurt products are commonly made by mixing preformed, frozen or semi-frozen chunks of the cookie dough and, perhaps, other ingredients into a semi-frozen ice cream base. The chunks of dough are thoroughly mixed with the basic ice cream and this mixture is frozen to yield a fairly even distribution of dough chunks in the ice cream.
Frozen ice cream novelty bars and the like, as opposed to simple containers of ice cream products, remain quite popular for their convenience and the fact that they are generally packaged in single servings wrappers. Since ice creams and frozen yogurts including doughs and the like have gained in popularity, manufacturers have been interested in producing frozen novelty products which include such doughs.
A wide variety of methods have been used in the past to include discrete additions to frozen novelties. Such discrete additions include such things as fudge syrups (such as are used in "fudge ripple" ice creams), nuts, chocolate chips, and the like. Such flavoring agents are referred to herein as discrete additions as distinguished from vanilla or chocolate flavorings, stabilizers and the like which form a part of the substantially homogenous ice cream or yogurt phase of the novelty.
In one method of making such novelties, the novelty may be formulated in a manner substantially the same as that used for making ice cream or yogurt including discrete additions which are packaged in standard cartons and other common commercial packages for bulk ice cream. For instance, nuts or chocolate chips may be mixed in with semi-frozen ice cream and this semi-frozen ice cream mixture may be dispensed into molds. The ice cream mixtures in these molds can then be frozen to produce a novelty having the desired shape.
Other ice cream novelties which have larger, continuous phases of discrete additions can be made by a laminating process. For instance, an ice cream novelty can be produced by forming ice cream into single serving-sized bars. A discrete addition, such as a layer of caramel or the like, may then be applied to the top of each of these bars. If so desired, the composite laminated structure may then be coated with a chocolate coating or the like by being dipped in or sprayed with a chocolate coating solution.
Others have used injection techniques whereby discrete additions are injected into pre-formed shapes of ice cream and the like. In such a process, a generally homogenous ice cream or yogurt may be formed into a desired shape and an injection mechanism can be inserted into the ice cream blank. A flowable discrete addition, such as a fudge syrup or a fruit compote can be injected into the ice cream blank.
Other frozen novelties have been made by a coextrusion process. In such a process, the frozen novelty is extruded through a die having a predetermined shape and the extrudate exiting the die has a predefined form. A frozen or semi-frozen ice cream or yogurt is commonly passed through a large channel and a discrete addition is added to the flow of the ice cream or yogurt through a separate tube which extends into the ice cream flow, generally in a parallel relationship.
Such a coextrusion process is exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 3,840,311, issued to Wight. The nature of the discrete additions which have heretofore been added in such a coextrusion process have been rather limited. In particular, the discrete additions have generally had to have substantially the same consistency and be at substantially the same temperature as the surrounding ice cream matrix. For these reasons, such coextrusion processes have generally been limited to an ice cream or yogurt composition which may have a different color or a different flavor from the generally homogenous ice cream matrix with which it is coextruded.
None of the processes outlined above would appear to be particularly effective for use in adding uncooked doughs and the like to frozen novelties. It is believed that consumers generally prefer these discrete additions of doughs to be in relatively large chunks to accentuate the heterogeneity of the product. The presence of such discrete additions in a product formed by the aforementioned methods can either make the forming method relatively difficult to execute or yield an uneven product with an undesirable appearance. For instance, if one were to add a dough in the lamination process outlined above, one would have to form the dough into sheets and cut the sheets into smaller, thin sections of about the same dimensions as the underlying ice cream base. Applying these sheets of dough could be rather difficult in that the dough sheets could present handling difficulties, and ensuring proper placement of the pre-formed sheet on each and every bar could be difficult to execute.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a method for forming a frozen novelty including a dough or other similar product as a discrete addition. Such a method should yield reproducible results and the resulting frozen novelty should have a uniform, attractive appearance.